Vanilla Beans

Do you ever think about vanilla when you are measuring out a teaspoon of extract? Where it comes from, how it is made? It's from a plant of course, an orchid. And how it came to be in your spice cabinet and in vanilla ice cream and in every baked good everywhere is fascinating.

Vanilla planifolia

I am reading the true story of Edmond Albius in a dramatized novel of his life by Gaëlle Bélem. The book is The Rarest Fruit. What a story.

Like the foodstuffs we take for granted -- corn, tomatoes, potatoes, chocolate -- the Aztecs cultivated vanilla. They used it to flavor cocoa. The chocolate elixir first served to Cortes was a drink flavored with vanilla and Cortes lost his mind. It was unlike anything he'd ever tasted.

He sent chocolate and vanilla back to Europe, and vanilla became a popular flavoring and perfume. 

To compete with the Mexican exports, vanilla vines were brought to European greenhouses and to their tropical colonies and they grew beautifully. But none ever produced the stringbean shaped pods that were the aromatic fruit. None. For three hundred years botanists grew vanilla orchids and never got any fruit. No insect outside of Mexico could pollinate the flowers.

In 1841 it was Edmond, a Black slave in the French colony of Reunion Island (formerly called Bourbon), who discovered how to pollinate vanilla orchids. 

Growers had long known how to hand pollinate plants, dusting female flowers with a bit of male pollen on a feather, but the vanilla orchid flower was oddly formed and hand pollinating didn't work until Edmond figured out an easy way to do it. 

He was 12 years old. 

Edmond as an adult after he was famous

A slave boy without a last name even, until emancipation came to Reunion Island in 1848 and at age 19 he picked the surname Albius when he and all the other slaves were freed. Albius: Latin for white. He could not read or write but he knew Latin botanical nomenclature.

You'd expect him to be a forgotten note in history, but his French owner, who had actually raised him in his home from infancy and doted on him (it was complicated), did allow him all credit. 

Edmond became famous. 

At twelve years old Edmond did clinics and exhibitions for plantation owners all over the island and nearby Madagascar, and they quickly adopted his pollinating method. The plantation growers then figured out the year long process to harvest, steam, cure, dry, extract and store the flavor essence. 

Production and profits exploded all across the globe. 

Vanilla cultivation and processing is labor intensive

By the end of the 1800s vanilla was much in demand, reliably available, and found its way into every baker's kitchen. The exotic orchid flavoring was so widespread it became the definition of classic. It became "plain vanilla".

Edmond never profited and died an old man in poverty. He was always widely credited with being something of a genius plantsman and the spark of a worldwide production of a valuable commodity, but as the author of the book says "he was never the right color". He could be a gardener but not a botanist, a field worker but not a patent holder, not a plantation owner producing what he made possible for others to profit from. 

Emancipation when he was 19 severed him from his French patron's enthusiastic support and left him adrift trying to make a living. That's the terrible, unsettling part of this human story.

All vanilla is still hand pollinated to this day using 12 year old Edmond's technique. Vanilla flavoring is the artificial chemical reproduction of vanillin compounds, but vanilla extract is the real orchid fruit, grown and pollinated by hand the way Edmond showed everyone to do it, and processed into flavoring the way the Aztecs did it.

whiff --- mmmm

Next time you make vanilla cupcakes, think of the barefoot, uneducated boy tending orchids in a French colony in 1841 and take a moment to say merci, Edmond Albius. 

Then take a whiff before you add the extract.